The Humorless Ladies of Border Control (8 page)

Panic: Maria ran ahead to Błażej's apartment to stuff everything in the bags. We tried to corner the Armenians to pay, but their credit card machine wouldn't work. We raced home; grabbed the backpacks, the rolling merch suitcase, the guitar, the banjo, and the accordion backpack; and ran across the uncrosswalked street, then down the endless escalators. Moscow's underground is the third deepest in the world, and it takes several minutes to reach the platforms. We hiked up more escalators, elbowing other riders, to the transfers, breath burning in our lungs. I ran ahead, then stopped, panting and soaked. We got to the train platform with two minutes to spare, the train already starting to roll, a dozen other procrastinators clamoring to get through the nearest door, the amused conductor half-blocking the entrance and mocking the scrum shoving and pushing our way on. We squeezed through as the train picked up speed. Jogging to keep up, Błażej threw the accordion over the crowd's heads onto the train, and then chucked the white plastic bag of bread and vegetables we'd bought for the ride. It hit the conductor in the back and exploded. A middle-aged man disappeared in a blur down the gap between the train and the platform. People looked at each other for what seemed like minutes until the young conductor yanked the emergency brake. Pandemonium took hold on the platform, and I said, “We better get out of here.” Maria nodded, and, dripping, we pushed through the corridors, car after car, until we reached our compartment. We stashed our bags under the bunks and over the sliding door,
then stood in the hallway, staring out the windows, as the sweat started to dry and we started to shiver.

“The man was seriously injured,” texted Błażej. “Not dead,” said the
provodnitsa
. “He was drunk.”

“I feel rotten,” said Maria, and I nodded.
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IV.

God-Forget-It House
(Trans-Siberian)

            
“‘No doubt it is beautiful. It is the great road to Siberia.' These words chilled me through. It is for my pleasure, I said to myself, that I travel this road: but what have been the thoughts and feelings of the many unfortunate beings who have traveled it before me? . . . That Russian hell is, with all its phantoms, incessantly before me. It has upon me the effect that the eye of the basilisk has upon the fascinated bird.” —The Marquis de Custine

W
ith blood on the wheels, the train rolled toward Siberia. Geographically speaking, Siberia proper wouldn't begin until Tyumen' (or maybe Yekaterinburg), but it was appropriate that our entrance onto the Trans-Siberian Railroad itself be accompanied by an anonymous, maybe fatal, accident, uncommented on and unnoticed by all except those at that door.

The great railroad combines in itself not just the allure of long-distance rail travel, long vanished from the United States, but also the chill of centuries of associations with the massive region itself—something between the wild heart of the Russian nation and the black stain on its moral soul. To Americans, the idea of the vast (in our case Western) frontier is an idea of freedom and a clean slate. The Kerouacian literature of Route 66 and the great westbound highways tell tales of arterial outflowings of optimism and possibility. The romance of the Russian frontier is a darker one, and its eastbound vein—the old Sibirskii Trakt cart road and the railroad that replaced it—is deeply scored with the dusk of punitive journeys and the impossibility of redemption.
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1
To go west in America was to go beyond the reach of Washington, but the trains to Siberia, covering twice the distance, run on Moscow time.

“There's no way this will end well,” I thought when I saw the little plastic potty on the floor of the train compartment and the wild-eyed child for whom it was intended. A hyperactive, malevolent tempest in a neon-green tank top, he cackled in my face, made a grab for my phone, and raced out the door and down the hall. His mother and grandmother gave weary half-chuckles and opened up glossy magazines.

We were headed directly south toward Samara, an old Volga River pirates' den by the Kazakh border. Previously called Kuybyshev, it was to have been the fallback capital of the Soviet Union during World War II and still boasts a never-used bunker built for Stalin. Most of our fellow passengers were Kazakhs headed home, as was the
provodnitsa
—though we discovered she was born in L'viv in western Ukraine, Maria's ancestral homeland. Having made that connection, she was friendlier to us. A pair of plainclothes policemen demanded our passports, while half a dozen children terrorized the hallway. “
Bandity, ne dity
” (bandits, not children), muttered the conductress to Maria. Two men with trays hung around their necks hawked toys—spinning, glowing toys, furry cube-shaped plush toys, battery-powered personal fans—and the gang of feral children screamed louder. The little demon sharing our room made a grab for one of the trays of toys. The dining car was full of Kazakhs who had seen us trudge through, sweating, with our instruments a few hours before, and they asked if we would play. We demurred and, exhausted, went to sleep. When we awoke, Maria's shoes were filled with little puddles of urine.

The approach to Samara was a massive Volga River crossing at least two kilometers across, over swamp and runoff, before we pulled into a futuristic blue-glass phallus-
cum
-shuttle-launcher that was the new train station. We saw for the first time the slouching, two-story wood houses with painted eaves, a distinctive village style that would become more familiar the farther east we went.
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2
The Samaran examples were near-destitute shacks; not until Tomsk and Irkutsk would we see them restored and—up to a point—protected, like the balconied bagatelles of New Orleans.

The other thing that Samara is known for is its brewery, and the town punks, having taken full advantage of its wares, were in high spirits when they greeted us. It was Ruslan the promoter's birthday, and while it was clear that before too long he wouldn't be much help, he was able to organize a ride to the apartment where we would be staying so Maria could shower. Meanwhile his friends took me to the brewery.

It was a brick building by the sandy beach of the Volga. Framed black-and-white photographs showed it in its nineteenth-century heyday, with barrels loaded onto horse-drawn sledges lined up in the mud. These days it was easier: you queued with empty plastic jugs or soda bottles outside a corrugated aluminum shack, next to the salted and dried whitefish. It was nobody's idea of balmy, but if you squinted you could just about imagine you were on a Jersey Shore boardwalk, and the neon beer taps looked like the swirling frozen-drink extruders of any good trashy beachfront. The actual beer was green with spirulina but not undrinkable.

The club was in a basement on the main drag. The walls were covered with intricate Sharpied murals: Stalin in hot pants and a belly-baring top, brandishing a sickle and riding a terrified Hitler, who was himself wearing a KISS T-shirt. It was a drunken and sweaty mess and one of the best shows of the entire tour.

Before and after this tour, Westerners often skeptically asked
me, “Do people there know your music?” And the answer was, somehow, yes. The punks of today have an infinitely more comprehensive music-sharing network than their predecessors: the Facebook-aping social network VKontakte. A Western reader is invited to imagine a combination of Facebook, Napster, and Pirate Bay, on which users can stream, share, or download a functionally universal library of popular media with the tacit approval, or benign disinterest, of the authorities. Kids on this circuit had as comprehensive a knowledge of RVIVR, Hot Water Music, and more obscure acts like Bridge & Tunnel and Good Luck as any Gainesville bike punk. And they had the enthusiasm that greets anyone who visits places located off the conventional touring routes—if no one goes there, but
you
go there, people are happy you came and at least curious to come see. Since they had universal access to my music on VKontakte, however, few were interested in buying CDs, preferring the T-shirts and vinyl records, which are prohibitively expensive to import. My already small stock of both was quickly exhausted.

Throughout the entire show the kids clapped aggressively, and polyrhythmically, and a good chunk of the crowd came back to the apartment where we were staying. This was unfortunate. Because of the short travel time to Orenburg the next day, we were getting on a train at four in the morning, and no one was in the mood to let us nap. People packed into the kitchen, laughing and smoking, and we tuned them out as best we could while lying on air mattresses in the next room. When my alarm went off at three thirty, we stepped carefully over the kids passed out around us, bought grapefruit juice at the station, and got on the train for another couple hours of not-quite-sleep.

When the train pulled into Orenburg—“famous,” said the
novelist Viktor Sorokin, “for its fine, intricate shawls and its narrow-eyed Russian-Chinese beauties”—at nine a.m., we went straight to the club. It was on the third floor of an office building, and a downright classy second-floor restaurant served us omelets before it was time to go to a hotel and get some real sleep. Said hotel, a thirty-minute drive out of town, past the statue of the cosmonaut Gagarin with upraised hands, in the middle of a dusty field, was an absurd nugget called the Hotel Jamaica. On the outside it was painted bright yellow with red polka dots, and decorated inside with a picture of a hula girl and a school of tropical fish. But the room was sunny and airy, and there was a little green praying mantis in the room and a banya in the basement. We ordered up a steam bath for after the show and took another nap. Maybe three three-hour stretches of sleep would somehow add up to a full night.

The major attraction in Orenburg was a white pedestrian bridge over the rather small Ural River that claimed to be the geographic border between Europe and Asia. Like the largest Lenin or the largest central square, though, this is a distinction promiscuously claimed. No matter: we photographed the column saying “Asia” and the colorful locks left by lovers on the bridge, and then treated ourselves to ice cream.

To the evident dismay of that day's show promoter, who was serving as our local host, we asked to go to the Museum of Orenburg Town History, which Maria had read contained a display about Pugachev's Rebellion. Pugachev was a Cossack ex-soldier who found himself at the head of a motley serf rebellion against Catherine the Great and passed himself off as the tsarina's late husband Peter III (whose murder Catherine had if not directed, certainly sanctioned). Pugachev was inevitably beaten, brought
in a metal cage from Orenburg to Saint Petersburg, beheaded, and drawn and quartered, and the rebellion caused Catherine to abandon her progressive plans toward emancipation. Pushkin wrote about him in
The History of Pugachev
and
The Captain's Daughter
(there is a statue of Pushkin outside the Orenburg museum), and Soviet history adopted him as an anti-imperialist martyr.

Our host couldn't have been less interested in this dusty local historical society, but the dowdy woman working the desk was thrilled to air her specialty. Despite our protestations that we didn't need a formal guided tour, she insisted on reciting a well-rehearsed presentation on Pugachev. They had devoted a whole room to him, though none of the artifacts were authentic: a rifle much like his rebels would have used, a replica of the metal cage in which he was dragged to his execution, a diorama.

The show was early, so we were backlit by the midsummer sun shining through the floor-to-ceiling glass windows while we played to an audience of timidly clapping young girls. Afterward we hid in a booth around which we could draw a red velvet curtain, ate pizza and coughed on cigarette smoke, went home early, and steamed in the banya.

The next day we rode a hulking old Volvo bus to Ufa in the July heat. It had a cracked windshield, a dignified Tatar driver with a white crew cut, and an interior decorated with warning signs in Swedish and a poster of Kim Kardashian. The radio played Russian pop that sounded like a continuous series of variations on “I Saw the Sign.” Each town we passed was announced by a thirty-foot stele, a 1960s-era attempt to express the full essence of a map-speck village in concrete, paint, and tin. We stopped
for a bathroom break, and I ordered a coffee. The ubiquitous instant brand is MacCoffee, which comes in a tearable foil packet decorated, for some reason, with eagles and stars-and-stripes. It reminded me of a passage in novelist Viktor Pelevin's
Babylon
in which a Russian advertising executive advises a client to litter his business card with eagles, dollar signs, and sequoias “because they'll assume you have American investors.” For convenient literary contrast, a group of young men in mismatched military outfits boarded the bus, their berets still sporting the hammer and sickle.

We arrived in Ufa, and I called our contact. Maria had been making the phone calls, since she speaks passable Russian, but in this case we were surprised to find it wouldn't make a difference. Dave was an American: balding, sideburns, a blue John Deere T-shirt, a toddler, and a beautiful Tatar wife—the picture of a happily aging hardcore kid in one of the most unlikely places. Ufa was the capital of the autonomous region of Bashkortostan, the Bashkirs being a Turkic Muslim ethnicity with an alphabet just dissimilar enough from Cyrillic to require bilingual signs.

Dave came here from Columbus, Ohio, in 1998 on a whim and simply stayed, solving his middle-American Gen-X malaise by removing himself to a place so unknown to the wider world that his very existence as an American there guaranteed his uniqueness. He sang in a local hardcore band, booked shows, and toured the same circuit we'd been traveling.